Saving money by making money: One engineer's quest saves millions at the US Mint

Lauren Larson reports.

Sometimes problems aren't visible to the naked eye … or even your standard
microscope. In 2006, Dr. Tony Ying, a material engineer at the U.S. Mint in
Washington D.C., and a team of nano-mechanical scientists at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology set out to find a solution to a very tiny
problem.

Now, that solution saves the U.S. Mint roughly $2 million per year.

In part three of Federal News Radio's special report, Rainmakers and Money Savers, we take an inside look at
how
innovative federal employees can outdo their own salaries in savings when they
team up and take initiative.

Mint, NIST pair up

"If you want to make a beautiful coin, first you have to make a beautiful blank,"
Ying said.

Dr. Tony Ying

A blank is a faceless coin. It becomes the coin we recognize after it is struck by
a pair of die. An average die for a dime used to last about 100,000 to 150,000
strikes. That was a short life in Ying's mind. The dies seemed to wear out and
crack, or break rather quickly. He wanted to know why.

In 2006, Ying started looking at the lifespan of coin dies and began to generate a
research database.

Ying took his research to NIST. There, he met up with a former colleague, Dr.
Richard Gates, who heads the Nanomechanical Properties Group at NIST. Ying worked
at NIST when he was studying for his PhD, and he knew Gates, a nanotribologist,
had the resources he needed.

"Tribology is just the study of rubbing and, in more practical terms, it's the
study of processes like friction, wear and lubrication," Gates said. "If you think
of what nano might mean, the width of a human hair is about fifty microns and
that's about 50,000 nanometers. So, nano is just really, really small. So
nanotribology is the study of friction, wear and lubrication on a very small
scale, and it's basically what happens on the surface of a coin during minting.
And it's one of the processes that we studied to try to understand what was going
on."

The Mint had the coins and the problem to solve, but NIST had the right equipment
and the environment.

Finding the culprit

Dr. Richard Gates

At NIST, the Nanomechanical Properties Group has a special facility where Gates
said it was possible to make the mechanical and dimensional measurements at the
very small scales they needed for this project. He said the lab is buried 12
meters underground for low vibration and described the clean-room environment as a
place with filtered air and scientists in "bunny-suits."

"We're doing research on such a small scale that dust particles can have an
adverse effect on some of the research we're doing," Gates said.

Ying was especially interested in using the Fourier Transform Infrared
Spectroscopy (FTIR). The machine is found in many labs, but the one at NIST
measures down to the atomic layer.

"Basically, you're using infrared light, and you're shining it off the coin, and
the light gets absorbed by chemicals that are on the surface. And by determining
the frequency of the absorption from the chemical, you can tell what chemicals are
on the surface," Gates said. "It also discovered a way of calibrating this process
to look at certain bonds that are there. So, we were able to determine not only
the presence of certain chemicals or chemical bonds but also how thick the layer
was that was built up. And that was important to the whole process of controlling
that process and actually minting in the coins."

Once they were able to look at everything in the lab, the proof was in the
pudding. They began to hone in on the lubricant as the culprit for premature wear
and compromise of the dies. But it wasn't just texture. As it turned out, the key
to solving the Mint's issue was controlling the amount of lubricant.

(Watch the video below to learn more about the design and production of coins.
Story continues after the video.)

"In some ways, it's like a three bears problem — Goldilocks and the Three
Bears. If you have too little lubricant, you have problems; you get too much
lubricant, you get problems. If you have just the right amount, then you can get
successful lubrication. That's what we ended up developing, basically a
monomolecular — a very thin controlled amount of lubricant — that was
just enough to strike a coin and allow the die life to increase," Gates said.

And increase it did. The tedious work paid off. Die life has more than doubled
since they changed the lubrication process. The Mint is saving roughly $2 million
per year in the cost of equipment, and time and labor spent replacing the dies.
The Mint is still tracking die life in the database, so it knows right away when
something goes amiss.

Just last year, the Mint saw a drop in the die life at the Philadelphia Mint. Ying
said they were able to pinpoint the problem immediately as a defective pump.
Without the ongoing database, the problem could have easily gone undetected.

Collaborating to save money

These days, scientists and engineers are operating on smaller budgets along with
the rest of the government. Feds attend fewer conferences and have to be more
creative when it comes to finding opportunities to network across their fields of
discipline. But Gates said that collaboration is how these money-saving ideas are
born.

"These kinds of fields are very multidisciplinary. It relies on not just one
aspect of chemistry or physics or something like that, but material science and
all sorts of engineering aspects that are brought in, and it's very hard to get
all of [that expertise] yourself," Gates said. "What you tend to find is that when
you're facing some sort of a problem, you need to go and seek other people's
guidance and expertise. So that's an important area in tribology."

Ying said the wealth of information available at NIST was key to his work at the
Mint.

"There's a lot of smart people who are willing to help you. It's a nice
environment to be in. Certainly the budget climate has been pared back … but
scientists are fairly resourceful, and we try to find cheaper ways to do it, and
get out there and interface with people. … It's a critical aspect of being a
scientist," Gates said.

It took about four years of research and development before the two organizations
arrived at a solution for the lubricant at the Mint. Now, they see the fruit of
that labor every month as they monitor the die life database and the savings in
their bottom line.

"Any improvement starts with an idea and, in this case, I think you have to really
recognize the concept that Tony envisioned and how he carried it through," said
Richard Robidoux, division chief of engineering for the U.S. Mint. "It required
that he consider a lot of different chemicals or elements that might be used as
lubricants, but worked to find ones that would create an atomic-level bond, which
would make the uniform but very thin layer that would provide the lubrication. So,
it did take a lot of thought and creativity on his part to achieve that and it
wasn't just a matter of taking certain ones off the shelf and trying them until we
found one that worked. He actually had to develop the chemical."

Dr. Ying and Dr. Gate's work on applying nanotribology in the coining industry was
published and can be found here.